How to setup and use EMDs for Google Business Profile.

The page has a detailed description and transcript. I'll pull more of the transcript so the summary matches what was actually said.

**Exact Match Domains Still Rank in Local SEO** — Edward Sturm with David Quaid (The Edward Show, E1189). Bullet summary of the main points:

- Exact match domains (EMDs) still help local SEO, especially in competitive cities, but the domain alone no longer ranks a site. You still need links, authority, trust, and a real business presence.

- Prefer a domain that combines a brand with the highest-value keyword and a city modifier (example: `escapewebdesignnyc.com`), not a pure keyword domain. Use that name on the Google Business Profile (GBP) as well.

- Legal entity name (LLC) is not the same as the trading name. In the US that is often a DBA; in the UK/Ireland a registered business name. Google cares about the name you trade under, which the domain can support.

- Start with keyword research (SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.) and build around one valuable root term instead of trying to rank for every service. Child pages inherit topical relevance from that focused domain.

- GBP verification is the hard part now. Google wants video of permanent signage, street-level frontage, and a real office — not a virtual address like Regus. Matching GBP services to dedicated service pages and linking them can surface in results within hours.

- Multiple GBPs can make sense for real extra locations or distinct divisions (e.g. hosting vs design), each with its own address and signage. Extra locations can also widen map visibility.

- EMDs may improve Google Ads quality score and cut cost per click (Quaid estimates a jump from about 3/10 to 6–7/10, roughly 20–40% savings on expensive keywords). A press release helps frame the new domain as part of the brand.

- The May 2024 Google API leak indicated EMDs are demoted relative to the old days, when a keyword domain could rank overnight. Strong brands are hard to displace; an EMD mainly puts a local business into contention, not at the top by itself.

- Adding “best” to a domain does little (example: `nybestroofer.com`). “Near me” domains no longer help — “near me” is treated as a query modifier, not ranking text.

- The site still has to look like a real business. Subfolders usually share authority better than subdomains. Separate domains are reasonable for distinct divisions, services, or locations.

Google cofounder Sergey Brin has spent $102 million to fight California’s proposed billionaire tax—he could owe $13 billion if he loses

Just a heads up - do not engage - their engagement is fake and designer to cause a devisive outcome. They're a grifter and/or spammer - didn't really give them time to find out.

Tried to blackmail us with a "we will embarrass you - either unban us and we take this down or we leave it up"

Go ahead - we dont give into harassment, bullying or other disgusting behavior.

Nobody cares - Weblinkr ahs 20,000 searches a month, 1m views on Reddit and we get 5-10 of these a day - this is from today.

Your attempt at assuaging your ego as the victim doesn't work for anyone, probably not even you.

https://preview.redd.it/mw2luu60mgth1.png?width=1844&format=png&auto=webp&s=c576bb2e7ed526232d9ce4e29fe9876668900dd4

Welcome back to the David Quaid SEO Show — Episode 8! In this episode, we're diving deep into everything that's changed in local SEO for 2026. Joined by Jake Henley (CEO of Evergrow Marketing & host of the Agency Growth podcast) and David Quaid, we cover Google's aggressive push of Local Service Ads, the shrinking levers available in Google Business Profiles, whether schema actually matters (spoiler: Jake ran a 10-week study), how to avoid cannibalization when building location pages, and a whole lot more.

Whether you're an agency owner, in-house SEO, or local business owner, this one's packed with actionable insights from two practitioners who live and breathe local SEO every day.

Guests:
Jake Henley — Evergrow Marketing & Agency Growth Podcast
agencygrowthpod.com

David Quaid — 26-year SEO veteran

Don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a 5-star review on iTunes or Spotify!

*Timestamps:*

0:00 — Intro & guest introductions
2:07 — 2026 local SEO: Google Ads pushing organic down
5:32 — Business naming conventions & branded search
8:56 — Organic SEO changes & Google Business Profile levers
11:33 — The 4 key Google Business Profile ranking factors
14:47 — Review manipulation & Google's tightening policies
19:28 — Categories must match your website content
21:15 — Competitive markets: website importance scales up
24:00 — Satellite offices for higher-ticket local businesses
29:48 — LLMs vs Google for local search
35:08 — Does schema matter for local SEO?
38:18 — Jake's 10-week schema study results
42:46 — Cannibalization: building location pages the right way
47:09 — Where to find Jake & David / Outro

In what is quickly escalating into a war of attrition - with SEOs on the front lines - whats your take?

Quick recap: Google sued SerpApi in December for scraping SERPs at scale, the pipe a lot of AI tools and rank trackers depend on. In July the court tossed the DMCA claim (with leave to amend). Meanwhile, Peec AI published research this month mapping OpenAI's in-house index ("Labrador"), with vertical indexes for news, shopping, PDFs and more, and experiments testing its own index against third-party SERPs.

A lot of LLMs seem to be using Open Crawl - do you think thatis a risk to Google or to LLM search quality?

So Google is trying to wall off its results while OpenAI is building so it doesn't need them.

Hot take: in 2 years "SEO" means optimizing for 3–4 separate indexes with different crawlers and different ranking logic, and most of us are only watching one of them in Search Console.

Questions for the sub:

• Is anyone seeing pages cited in ChatGPT that don't rank on Google at all?
• Are you tracking other bots in your logs yet?
• Which indexes will win out - Open Crawl?
• Do you think moving away from Google = a Quality risk?
• Or is GEO a real discipline or a rebrand to sell new retainers?

Edits

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P.S.: happy to share resources if anyone is looking for a deep-dive away from the debate

https://preview.redd.it/ihbygyfhxvsh1.png?width=1092&format=png&auto=webp&s=7c576c76e90c88ad0e569cf4f64215a75594e829

My post about United charging $11k for a basic economy seat to CNX (Chiang Mia) was getting upvoted - so what did the corrupt mods at United Airlines do?

Well - the post was about United, it has the flair "Images" (which is pretty pointless but compliant) - and lots of chatter.

So they did the normal thing any dictatorship bootlickers would do - they removed it, banned and muted me!

The Reddit Admins have already run a survey of r/UnitedAirlines, leaking that the mod team are under investigation for this kind of BS.

G2 measure (score out of 10 unless noted)	ChannelSight	MikMak	Wayvia (PriceSpider)
Star rating (out of 5)	4.5	4.5	4.6
Reviews	23	67	37
Meets requirements	8.8	8.5	8.9
Ease of use	8.8	8.6	9.0
Ease of setup	8.6	8.1	8.2
Ease of admin	8.6	8.5	8.3
Quality of support	7.9	9.2	9.2
Good partner in doing business	9.0	9.0	9.2
Product direction (positive)	10.0	9.8	9.5
Largest reviewer segment	Small business, 52%	Mid-market, 39%	Enterprise, 60%

Great Story from u/rustybrick

>The volatility may be calming today, a bit, but it was a pretty heated weekend after the announcement of this September 2026 spam update. It does feel like these spam updates are having more of an impact that the older spam updates from years ago.

>What exactly this update is targeting is not fully known yet, but I do suspect we will see lots of tactics that get hit by this update - not just one specific tactic...

>As a reminder, this spam update was announced Thursday, September 24th at about 12 pm ET. Google told us it would take about two weeks to roll out. So far, it has only been less than five days since the rollout began.

>Here are what the tools are showing - look at the Saturday volatility in these tools: